by Donald Tyson
By the authority of the dreaded name, Azathoth, that few dare speak, I charge thee, open to me the gateway of Aquarius the Water-Bearer that lies between the blazing pillar Sadalmelik on the right hand and the blazing pillar Skat on the left hand. As the solar chariot [or, lunar chariot] crosses between these pillars, I enter the city of the Necronomicon through its Third Gate. Selah!
Visualize the key of the Third Gate in your right hand some six inches long and made of cast bronze. Feel its weight, texture and shape as you hold it. Extend your right arm and use the key as a pointer to project upon the surface of the gate the seal of the key, which should be visualized to burn on the gate in a line of white spiritual fire. Point with the astral key at the center of the gate and speak the words:
In the name of Azathoth, Ruler of Chaos, by the power of Yog-Sothoth, Lord of Portals, the Third Gate is opened!
Visualize the gate unlocking and opening inward of its own accord upon a shadowed space beyond. On the astral level, walk through the gateway and stand in the dark space beyond. Focus your mind upon the particular god or devil of the mythos that you wish to investigate and open yourself to receive communications or impressions from this deity-for the devils are merely deities that work hate and destruction. In a more general sense, the ritual of the Third Gate may be used to scry or communicate with any deity or ruling power, whether good or evil by nature.
After fulfilling the purpose for which this gate was opened, conclude the ritual by astrally passing out through the gate and visualizing it to close. Draw the seal of the Third Key on the surface of the gate with the astral key in your hand, and mentally cause it to lock itself shut, as it was at the beginning of the ritual. Speak the words:
By the power of Yog-Sothoth, and authority of the supreme name Azathoth, I close and seal the Third Gate. This ritual is well and truly ended.
Allow the image of the gate to grow pale in your imagination and fade to nothingness before you turn away from the ritual direction.
The Fourth Gate
:)vecraft was a firm believer that the universe is not only stranger than we imagine, Dut stranger than we can imagine. He was infuriated when writers of weird fiction made their alien races humanoid, and gave the members of those races human emotions and motivations. In 1927 he commented in a note that accompanied a story submission to the magazine Weird Tales: "To me there is nothing but puerility in a tale in which the human form-and the local human passions and conditions and standardsare depicted as native to other worlds or other universes."
A consequence of Lovecraft's philosophy that alien races and creatures should be truly alien is the large number of bizarre and shocking monsters that populate his stories. Lovecraft was able to draw upon his background studies in astronomy, geology, and biology to invest his monsters with unique shapes and unearthly purposes. An example is the alien beings that inhabit the unilluminated cavern world of N'kai, deep beneath the plains of Oklahoma. They are composed of a viscose black fluid that moves by flowing along channels cut in the stone floors of their chambers, but are capable of rearing up and taking on other shapes. This same concept was used to good advantage in the episode of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation that is titled "Skin of Evil," illustrating that even in the present generation it has not lost its power to shock.
An unusual aspect of Lovecraft's monsters is that they seldom care about human motivations or intentions. Either they are indifferent to our race, or they look upon us as something to be eaten, or manipulated for their own purposes. They are seldom evil in the usual sense of the term, and have nothing to do with Christian morality. By the same token, they are seldom good in the Christian sense, and show no interest in helping human beings. They do not tempt us, unless it is with the temptation to learn about things utterly alien to the usual human sphere. Some of the more intelligent monsters may be induced to barter knowledge at a price, but only when it is to their own advantage.
All of Lovecraft's alien races might be classed as monstrous, since all of them are bizarrely inhuman. Beyond this gate are gathered lesser species with degenerate or malicious tendencies and grotesque individual creatures, as well as things uncanny and uncouth that make up the varied living detritus of the mythos. A scattering of them are based on examples from the classic Greek mythology that Lovecraft studied in his boyhood, such as the Medusa and the Sphinx. A few were inspired by the creations of other writers of horror fiction, such as the living black slime, which was conceived first by Clark Ashton Smith, the Dholes (or bholes) that derive from a word used in a story by Arthur Machen, and the Hounds of Tindalos, which are the invention of Frank Belknap Long.
The worshippers of onyx and basalt images of the toad-god Tsathoggua in the lightless cavern realm of N'kai were alien creatures with bodies of viscose black slime that flowed from place to place along channels cut into the stone floors. They were able to assume different shapes at will. When the men of blue-litten K'n-yan descended through red-litten Yoth to the depths of black N'kai to explore this unknown land with powerful atomic searchlights, they were attacked by the creatures of black slime, and many of them were killed before they could seal the entrance to N'kai.
The viscose black slime was first described by Clark Ashton Smith in his story The Tale of Satampra Zeiros, in which the living black slime is not presented as a species of beings, but as a solitary guardian in a jungle temple of the toad-god Tsathoggua, who pursues two thieves that enter the temple. Smith sent his manuscript for Lovecraft to read in 1929, shortly after writing the story. Lovecraft responded with delight to Smith that the story came "close to being your high point in prose fiction to date." He incorporated the concept of a conscious, living black liquid into his own story The Mound, co-authored with Zealia Bishop, the writing of which was begun in December of 1929, and finished in the spring of the following year.
(The Mound)
Creatures who came out of the depths of a Louisiana swamp south of New Orleans to assist in the sacrifices of the cult of Cthulhu. It was these things that did the actual killing of the sacrificial victims. There is no clear description of their appearance.
(The Call of Cthulhu)
These creatures dance across the bog to the sound of reedy flutes and beating drums beneath the moonlight, luring men to their doom in the dark waters. They are "strange airy beings in white" said to resemble pale, wistful naiads.
(The Moon-Bog)
The term or one very like it originated in the 1904 story The White People by Arthur Machen, where the sentence appears, `And I must not say who the Nymphs are, or the Dols, or Jeelo, or what voolas mean." Machen gave no indication elsewhere of what the Dols may have been.
In Lovecraft's fiction, the Dholes (or bholes, as originally spelled by Lovecraft) are monstrous creatures several hundred feet long, with bodies bleached and viscous, who inhabit tunnels that honeycomb the distant planet Yaddith. In the past, they were in unceasing battle with the ruling race of that planet, who were powerful wizards, and forever strove to make their way to the surface. The great wizard Zkauba worked spells to keep them in their burrows. Eventually they prevailed, and in our present time the world is theirs.
In the dreamlands of our Earth, they are said to crawl and burrow in the Vale of Pnath, which lies amid the Peaks of Throk. No human being has ever seen a Dhole because they crawl about only in absolute darkness. Their touch as they wriggle past those who find themselves in their presence is slimy. They can be heard by the rustling they make amid the piles of bones of their prey.
In The Whisperer in Darkness, the detached brain of Henry Wentworth Akeley of Vermont reveals in conversation with Albert Wilmarth the true nature of the Dhols. What that nature may be is not specified in the story. "Dhol" is probably only a variation in spelling of "Dhole," so it seems doubtful that a different alien species is intended.
(Through the Gates of the Silver Key; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath; The Whisperer in Darkness)
A monster the size of a hippo
potamus with five hairy heads is observed by Houdini after he is cast into a pit beneath the "gateway temple of Khephren beside the Sphinx" by a band of Arab thieves. He watches by torchlight as the undead Egyptian pharaoh Khephren and his decaying queen Nitokris make offerings of mummified corpses to the monster, amid a host of the undead. Suddenly the awareness dawns on him that it is merely the forepaw of a much vaster monster-the very creature upon which the original Sphinx had been modeled.
(Imprisoned with the Pharaohs)
Lovecraft described them as "repulsive beings" who die in the light, and who leap about on long legs like kangaroos. They dwell in the Vaults of Zin. The hairy and gigantic gugs use the ghasts for food.
(The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
Lovecraft's ghouls first appear in his 1923 story The Lurking Fear. In this early story they have not reached their final form, but are the members of the degenerate and isolated Martense clan, the inbred and prolific remnants of which dwell in a network of tunnels beneath the cellar of the deserted Martense mansion on Tempest Mountain, in the Catskills. These ghouls, who resemble and were probably inspired by the ghouls of the legendary Sawney Bean Clan of Scotland, venture out of their burrows at night during the frequent thunder storms that plague the mountain, seeking human victims for food.
The Sawney Bean legend was popular in Scotland and England, although it is not known with certainty whether it was based on historical fact or wholly fabulous. According to the legend, Alexander Bean and his wife lived in a cave on the seacoast of West Ayrshire during the sixteenth century. Over a span of twenty-five years they produced through incestuous interbreeding children and grandchildren that numbered forty-six. They avoided human contact and remained unknown to the people of the region, in part because their deep cave was treacherous to access, the entrance being blocked by high tides. They survived by murdering travelers, stealing their possessions, and using the corpses for meat, the excess of which they pickled for later consumption. When an attempt to murder a man and his wife on the road went awry and they were discovered, King James the VI of Scotland ordered the matter investigated. The entire Bean clan was captured and executed.
The protagonist in The Lurking Fear described one of the Martense clan as "a filthy whitish gorilla thing with sharp yellow fangs and matted fur. It was the ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition." Nowhere in this story did he actually refer to these creatures as ghouls, although he called the Martense mansion "ghoulishly haunted." The ape-like creatures he described as "cannibal devils."
Parallels between the Bean legend and Lovecraft's tale are obvious. Both the Bean and the Martense clans lived beneath the ground and only ventured forth at night. The existence of both clans remained unknown to the local populations. Both were the product of incestuous inbreeding. Both produced a numerous and degenerate brood, although Lovecraft's ghouls are more outwardly devolutionary, having the matted fur and fangs of apes. Both clans lived on the flesh of human beings they hunted.
The theme of human beings who have degenerated into subhuman monsters is common in the mythos. It appears in one of Lovecraft's earliest stories, The Beast In the Cave, written in 1905 when he was only fifteen years old, in which an explorer of the labyrinthine Mammoth Cave encounters and kills in the darkness a horrible semihuman creature who turns out to be a man lost in the bowels of the cave years before who had been unable to find his way to the surface. The unfortunate was described by the explorer as "an anthropoid ape of large proportions" with long, snow-white hair, and long rat-like claws extending from the atrophied hands and feet. The implication is that this creature has been surviving on the flesh of human beings he has murdered in the darkness.
The Rats in the Walls presents the reader with a multigenerational clan of decadent English aristocrats named de la Poer that in past centuries interbred with semi-human subterranean creatures and feasted on the flesh of degenerate human beings raised as livestock in a grotto below the foundations of their estate house of Exham Priory, near the village of Anchester. An American descendant of the family buys the ruins and restores them, but upon investigating what lies below, he goes mad, murders one of his friends, and half-devours his corpse before this American is found and placed into a madhouse. The similarity with the Martense clan is obvious, but the de la Poer ghouls have all expired and are no more than gnawed bones. It is the protagonist's horror at realizing that he has descended from such monsters that drives him insane.
The source of Lovecraft's lifelong fascination with human degeneration may have been the ordeal in early childhood of watching his father descend into madness. He father was probably the victim of syphilis, although this diagnosis, if it was ever made, does not appear to have been revealed to the Lovecraft family. Not many years after his father's death, Lovecraft's mother began to exhibit signs of mental instability. She was committed to the Butler Hospital for the insane, where her mad husband had died, and she lived there the remainder of her life.
Whatever the reason, Lovecraft developed a deep fascination for ghouls. In Pickman's Model they are a separate race that dwell in tunnels beneath the streets of old Boston, unsuspected by the human population of the city, coming to the surface only at night to hunt for their human prey. These Bostonian ghouls have the custom of exchanging their infants for human infants, which they raise as their own children, teaching the toddlers how to consume human flesh. Lovecraft asserted a close genetic link between ghouls and humans, writing, "The dog-things were developed from mortals!" The ghoul babies left in the cribs of Boston families are raised as human beings, but they eventually revert to their ghoulish natures. The artist Pickman, who is one of these changelings, leaves human society behind him altogether and goes to dwell permanently beneath the ground in the darkness.
A practical reason for the exchange of ghoul infants for human infants is to refresh the ghoul bloodlines, which otherwise might decline irrevocably through excessive inbreeding. It must be assumed that human babies raised as ghouls go on to breed with ghoul females. The same theme of hybridization between human and nonhuman races figures prominently in The Shadow Over Innsmouth, where the Deep Ones are eager to interbreed with human beings, perhaps for the revitalization of their bloodlines.
In Pickman's Model the ghouls are described as dog-faced, with a flat nose, bloodshot eyes, pointed ears, and drooling lips. On the hands are "scaly claws"-thickened and elongated fingernails with ridges. The feet he described as "half-hooved" in order to evoke the cloven feet of the Devil, and perhaps to suggest that the fables about the Devil's cloven hooves had their origin in the feet of ghouls. Lovecraft often did this-in The Shadow Over Innsmouth he made the suggestion that the myths about mermaids had their origin in past sightings by mariners of the Deep Ones. In this manner he interwove his own mythos with the classic mythology of ancient Greece, as a way of lending his mythos greater authority.
The ghouls reach their fullest development in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Randolph Carter encounters them while exploring their part of the dreamlands in his sleep. They dwell on a plain high above the Vale of Pnath, beyond the Peaks of Throk. The Vale of Pnath, home to the burrowing Dholes (or bholes), contains a mountain made of bones from humans and other beings such as the enormous, hairy gugs that ghouls use as food. The ghouls ceaselessly drop these bones over the edge of a high crag at the limit of their plain, which is barren and empty apart from randomly strewn boulders and the entrances to underground ghoul burrows.
They are ruled by none other than the former artist Richard Pickman, who has cast off the trappings of his polite Bostonian upbringing and reverted to his ghoul nature. Even so, he has exerted a moderating influence on ghoul society. Of olden times it had been the custom of the ghouls to kill and eat their own comrades wounded in warfare, but Pickman discouraged this custom.
Pickman advises his friend Carter to disguise himself as a ghoul. Carter shaves off his beard because,
as Lovecraft stated, ghouls have no beards. He rolls himself naked in grave mold to give his skin the proper shade and texture, and imitates the slumping lope of the ghouls. That Carter is able so easily to imitate ghouls indicates that they are not too dissimilar from men in appearance, apart from their canine faces, although the naked Pickman was described by Lovecraft as "rubbery." They have their own language, which consists of meeping and glibbering noises. Carter is able to speak a few words of it, having been taught by Pickman. This indicates that the intelligence of ghouls is not greatly less than that of human beings.
The ghouls acknowledge no masters, not even the Old Ones. For this reason they are willing to defy the wrath of Nyarlathotep by helping Carter in his quest to reach Kadath. They are presented in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath as sociable, selfcontrolled, and well organized. They are bound by solemn treaties of mutual assistance with the night-gaunts, who have no lord but hoary Nodens. Both are hostile toward the moon-beasts and the horned inhabitants of Leng. Pickman characterizes the nightgaunts as "the advance guard and battle steeds of the ghouls." The night-gaunts carry ghoul warriors through the air into battle. The leaders of the ghouls are called chiefs.
(The Lurking Fear; The Rats in the Walls; Pickman's Model; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)
Hairy, long-armed monsters that destroyed the ancient human civilization of Lomar, which existed in a past age near the North Pole. When the great ice sheet crushed the land of Zobna beneath its advancing edge, the people of Zobna fled south and seized control of Lomar from the cannibal Gnophkehs, establishing there a new kingdom. It appears that their victory was not permanent, for the Gnophkehs eventually took back the land that had been taken from them.
(The Mound; Polaris; The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath)